The Committee on Life-Course Perspectives on Middle and Old Age, an interdisciplinary effort, will investigate changes and stability in selected aspects of aging of individuals over their life course. It will stress primarily social and psychological aspects of the life course, but will emphasize interactions not only with biological, but also with demographic, cultural, environmental, and historical changes. It will focus, within the context of the life course, upon childhood, youth, and early adulthood as prologues to middle age and upon middle age as a prologue to old age. Working with selected ongoing longitudinal and historical studies, the committee will aim towards an elaboration and specification of the life-course perspective through direct confrontation with the findings from these studies. As part of its program of activities, the committee and its consultants will convene topical meetings, seminars and workshops, and other special projects. The results of the committee's deliberations will be prepared as working papers and as a final report for circulation to a wide range of scholars. Hopefully, these activities will result in the refinement of the life-course perspective, the identification of research questions, the recruitment of scholars, and the stimulation of new research proposals.